About
About
/ About the making of this film
/ Biographies
/ Cast
/ Message from Kondiaronk
For a number of years, my research and video making have moved across Indigenous cosmovisions, life sciences, and anthropology, which are woven together with the poetic language of moving images. Rather than bringing these fields into a single worldview, I am drawn to the interstitial spaces where multiple realities can coexist while remaining distinct. For me, film becomes a medium through which different forms of knowledge can meet in unexpected and open-ended ways. I approach artistic research as a space of encounter, where knowledge is not extracted or represented from a distance, but slowly emerges through relationships, reciprocity, and dialogue.
Importantly, Dialogues with the Future builds on my experience of many years of collaboration with the Inga people of Colombia, particularly through Devenir Universidad (2019–2023), a project dedicated to co-creating concepts for an Indigenous university rooted in their territory.
From the outset, this work was grounded in a close relationship with the charismatic Inga leader Hernando Chindoy. Over many months, we engaged in dialogues on the living territory, politics, and education. This experience deeply shaped how I understand knowledge as something living, relational, and collective. Later, my reading about Kondiaronk and Lahontan strongly resonated with this earlier effort to bridge cultural difference and think across worlds rather than through fixed categories. Their encounter echoed my own experiences in southern Colombia.
This process also transformed me. In Dialogues with the Future, I found myself moving between aspects of Kondiaronk and Lahontan—not as historical figures, but as positions in dialogue. Listening and speaking, questioning and reflecting, their encounter became a living space where different ways of thinking and being could meet and affect one another.
Concepts that continue to guide me include what Marisol de la Cadena describes as cosmopolitical events and pluriversal contact zones—spaces where different worlds meet without becoming the same. I understand my projects as inhabiting these contact zones, where knowledge and identity are always in motion. In this sense, my work is an ongoing attempt to create spaces in which different realities can meet, and where new futures may emerge—not through agreement or assimilation, but instead by allowing the coexistence of many wolds.
Drawing on the original publication from 1703, I drafted a script by choosing the ideas that are most relevant to the emergence of modern democracy. Lydia Zimmermann and Etienne Turpin collaborated in the process of choosing, editing, and translating the text into a contemporary language. While the original Dialogues addressed the role of women in Indigenous society and briefly mentioned Kondiaronk’s daughter, I decided to expand this reference into a distinct chapter, giving it a much more central role within the work.
An additional character exists outside of historical time, signaling intertwined temporalities. This figure is an artistic invention.
Speaking in voice-over in Québécois French, the young woman reflects in contemporary language on an expanding and constantly reconfigured world—one in which everyone believes they inhabit the center of things, while in reality every world is surrounded by another world, and all people remain imaginary to one another. Her narrative unfolds as multidimensional and cosmopolitical.
Through her 1970s clothing and the accompaniment of 1970s music, she evokes the political awakening and social transformations that I personally experienced during that decade, creating a parallel with the intellectual and political upheavals triggered by the Enlightenment.
This character allowed me to introduce the notion of non-linear time, and with it the possibility that we may still intervene in and reshape historical moments across temporal distances.
In that sense, the story treats thought itself as a kind of time travel — an invisible force moving across generations, altering perception, memory, and action.
Through an altered perception, what we observe alters as well, its behavior starts to change, it becomes more fluid and interactive, almost participatory. You sense the one-ness with that object that you are looking at. The poignant message by Kondiaronk that was delivered to the actor Gerald Auger during our shoot in Quebec became a striking confirmation of this possibility: that a figure or event from the past can actively intervene in contemporary consciousness and reshape how its meaning is understood. Rather than remaining fixed within historical time, the past reveals itself as something dynamic — capable of speaking back to us, altering perception, and participating in the ongoing creation of meaning. In this sense, the film is not a reproduction of historical dialogues but about how ideas contaminate later minds. It’s a little piece of poetry in the universe.
Ursula Biemann
Ursula Biemann is an artist, author and video essayist. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork from Greenland to Amazonia, where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests and water. In her multi-layered videos, she interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, SF poetry and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality.
From 2018 to 2023, Biemann worked on a major commission by Museo de Arte, Universidad Nacional de Colombia for the co-creation of a new Indigenous University in the South of Colombia led by the Inga people where she contributed the online platform Devenir Universidad. Her recent video installation Forest Mind (2021) emerges from this long-term collaboration.
With Dialogues with the Future, (opens in a new tab) she ventures into new artistic territory, expanding her essayistic practice through more conventional cinematic forms by exchanging documentary interviews for historical drama in an exploration of philosophy.
She has published numerous books, including Forest Mind with Spector Books (2022) and the audiovisual online monograph Becoming Earth (opens in a new tab) on her ecological video works from 2011–2021. Biemann’s work contributes to major museum exhibitions worldwide and to international Art Biennials. She has had recent retrospective exhibitions at MUAC Mexico City and Freiraum MQ in Vienna, and upcoming at the Mrac Occitanie, Sérignan, and IVAM Valencia, Spain.
Lydia Zimmermann
Lydia Zimmermann is a filmmaker and artist who lives in Zurich and Barcelona. She has written, edited, and directed short and feature films, television movies, and documentaries, and has produced video installations for art galleries and museums. She has collaborated with Ursula Biemann as director of photography on several video projects. She is currently developing Glaç, a feature film produced by Oberon Media.
Lydia has taught film at film schools, including the European Film Actors School, at universities such as Pompeu Fabra University and Ramon Llull University, and through NGOs including Cine Institute and Centre Gambidi. She is the curator of Curtidas (opens in a new tab), an artist residency and space for artistic and social exchange and experimentation in Barcelona.
Lydia holds a BA in Film from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and an MA in Transdisciplinarity from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).
Etienne Turpin
Dr. Etienne Turpin is a philosopher and editor-in-chief at K. Verlag in Berlin. He is co-editor of several of the publishing house’s series, including Processing Process and Pensées soignées. Previously, he was co-founder and co-editor of intercalations: paginated exhibition series (2014–2025), published by K. Verlag and Haus der Kulturen der Welt as part of the Anthropocene Project.
He was the lead co-author and co-curator, together with Anna-Sophie Springer, of the international, exhibition-based research project Reassembling the Natural (2013–2023), and co-author of the accompanying edited volume Productions of Nature (Open Humanities Press, forthcoming in 2025). He has collaborated with Ursula Biemann on various publication projects and events.
Previously, Etienne worked as a research associate at MIT, as a research fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Art at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, as Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the SMART Infrastructure Facility in Australia, and as a Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan.
He has taught advanced design research at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture, and Design in Moscow, UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of Toronto. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Department of Theory and Policy Studies (now Department of Social Justice Education) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada.
- Director/Artist
- Ursula Biemann
- Assistant Director
- Lydia Zimmermann
Cast
- Kondiaronk
- Gerald Auger
- Baron de Lahontan
- Kris Demeanor
- Onienta, daughter of Kondiaronk
- Jemmy Echaquan-Dubé
- Commentatrice
- Philomène Bilodeau
- Emilie, daughter of Dr. Tronchin
- Cecilia Steiner
- Madame de Montfort
- Mariama Sylla
Film Team Quebec
- Production Support
- Véronique Vigneault
- DOP camera
- Laurent Ulrich
- 2nd camera & lighting
- Emmanuelle Laroche
- Sound recording
- Jesse Dubé-Smith
Film Team Château de Lavigny
- Camera
- Caroline Hepting
- Sound recording
- Theodora Mennthonex
- Costume design
- Ursula Biemann
- Costume dressmaker
- Patrizia Gwerder
- AI textile design
- Fiona Knecht, ZHdK
- Script
- Ursula Biemann, Etienne Turpin
- Cut
- Ursula Biemann
- Sound design
- Patrick Codenys
- “War Cry” song
- Cris Derksen
- Graphic Design
- Mariana Hoyos, El Altillo (opens in a new tab)
We thank for their support
Fondation Heinrich Maria & Jane Ledig-Rowohlt and
Sophie Kandaouroff for the location Château de Lavigny
Haema Sivanesan, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
Sharon Kahanoff, EMMEDIA Production Society, Calgary
We gratefully acknowledge the generous
financial support of Pro Helvetia for the film.
The website is supported by the
Cultural Department of the Canton of Zurich.
MESSAGE FROM KONDIARONK
One morning, Gerald Auger showed us a text message from Kondiaronk himself, channelled to him by a spiritual friend in Alberta. His message reached us across the centuries, right there on our film set.
To: Gerald Auger
Re: Message from Kondiaronk
9 August 2025
“Your voice is not yours alone. It carries the marrow-song
of many. When you speak in this role, you are not repeating
my words — you are planting them fresh into the soil of
a time I never walked.
Do not ask why you are here — ask what will be here
because you stood in this place.
The dialogues you carry are not ‘of the future’ only.
They are the same dialogues I carried to the French,
to my own, to those who thought we were enemies.
You must not play me as a ghost. Play me as a living flame —
not trapped in 1690, but burning in the breath of now.
In this way, you will not pretend to be me. You will become
the same instrument I was — a bridge between worlds that
believed they could not hear each other.
Remember: a leader is not the loudest drum, but the
rhythm that others find their step to.
My work was not mine alone, and neither will yours be.
Walk well.”
Kondiaronk’s final message:
“If he walks with my voice, I will walk with his heart.”